Thoughts on politics, law, culture and guns from an eclectic, but mainly center-right point of view

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Irony Abounds

The '65 Voting Rights Act was passed, with serious Republican support, to redress the wrong the racist Democrats had done, particularly in the South, to prevent black Americans from registering to vote. In Mississippi, for example, back then, the whites registered about 68% of their population in the state but only about 8% of the black population was registered. The worst offending southern states were required to get pre-authorization from the feds for nearly any change in voting law those states proposed. The other states could be sued by the feds for any discrimination their voting laws created but didn't have to get fed permission to change voting laws. So all states were equal but some states were less equal than others.

But the times have changed. Even though the voting rights act was renewed for 25 years, a few years ago, by nearly unanimous votes in Congress (no one wants to be called a racist for not supporting the voting rights act even if parts of it should no longer be supported), the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the South no longer discriminated any worse than any other state and treating the southern states differently, when the states there were no different, was unconstitutional. The basic law was not touched. The discrimination against the South to prevent discrimination was ended, as was proper (in Mississippi, for example, black Americans are registered at a greater rate than whites). This is actually good news. The South (because it is no longer ruled by racist Democrats) no longer discriminates against blacks vis a vis voter registration. Hooray!

That's not how Democrats are treating the decision. They're pretending the Constitutionalist justices gutted the act (complete falsehood). I personally think it's always good to treat people the same and that goes for groups of people too, like state populations. If no state in the South is now worse than any other state about black voter registration then, in the name of anti-discrimination, let's stop discriminating against the South.